Labrador by Kathryn Davis

Author:Kathryn Davis [Davis, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-879-2
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2018-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

“Once upon a time there was an old woman who lived in a small house in the middle of the tundra. She was huge and fat and she got fatter by the day, mysteriously, because all she ate was spring salad—the partly digested lichens and mosses she scraped from inside the intestines of caribou. She never touched their flesh, but piled carcasses up behind her house, to tempt the predators. She was lonely. She was a million years old and what she wanted more than anything in the world was a child on whom to lavish her riches. Because, you see, she was very rich, this old woman. Inside her house she had boxes and boxes of jewels and gold, which she’d stolen over the years from out of the pockets of the men who came north to map her kingdom. They starved to death, or they froze, resorting to boiling their own clothing, choking, naked, on the tongues of their boots.

“This old woman knew that for the purposes of breeding these men were less than useless, even if she was lucky enough to find one of them alive. They were too tender and thin, like the shoots of cotton grass that came up in the early summer. And besides, they would have found her repulsive. She knew that. But she also knew that the King of the Bears was her designated mate; she’d planned it that way herself, in the beginning. So she waited. It took a million years, but eventually one day, when the snow was blowing around her—a glamorous effect, she thought, like a cape, and then, again, it felt so good—he appeared. He was tall and white. He was whiter than snow, which is where that cliché got its original meaning. Their congress was brief: he mounted her from behind, leaving the marks of his claws across her breasts. And when he was done he left her panting in the snow and lumbered off to the carcass pile, where he chipped off whole frozen chunks of meat with those same claws. He ate and he ate and he ate. The meal had been waiting for him for a million years. And as he ate, his hide began to strain; it began to get thinner and thinner, thinner than membrane, thinner than the wall of a single cell. The old woman could scarcely contain her merriment; never before had she seen such a sight. And then—boom!—he exploded. Pieces of him flew off in all directions. It’s been suggested that this is how the land animals were made, but that’s just wishful thinking.

“The old woman crouched down to shield herself from the putrid fallout: his privates, with a remote and mindless irony, hit her in the rump. Finally, when she thought she was safe, she looked up. And there, where only moments before he’d stood gorging himself, was a child. The old woman was filled with rapture! Here was a beautiful girl-child—as beautiful as the old woman was hideous.

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